“Oh My Kadavule”… Ashok Selvan and Ritika Singh battle it out in a half-decent rom-com

The first half is insufferable, but post interval, the film springs the sweetest of surprises. It doesn’t just get better, it becomes brilliant.

Spoilers ahead…

Oh My Kadavule is the kind of movie you want to see Ashok Selvan in. The actor is just 30 and he has the tousled-hair looks to carry off romantic lead roles, but his resume is a tad grim, with entries like Thegidi and Sila Samayangalil — and even Soodhu Kavvum, with its fabulous high concepts, is not exactly a light entertainer. As for Kootathil Oruthan, it could have been a romance between a very ordinary guy and a way-out-of-his-league woman, but it kept veering off into noble-minded subplots. It wanted to be a love story. It also wanted to change the world.

Ashwath Marimuthu’s film simply wants to change Arjun (Ashok Selvan). He gets married to childhood friend Anu (Ritika Singh), but very soon, they’re at a family court, filing for divorce. And then, God makes an entry in the form of Vijay Sethupathi (Ramesh Thilak plays His assistant) and makes Arjun wonder if he is making a hasty decision. Oh My Kadavule, thus, joins a select handful of films in which human beings are guided by God, who becomes part-therapist, part-pal. In spirit, it reminds you of Carl Reiner’s Oh, God!, where God enlists a supermarket worker to spread His word, and Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, where an angel shows a suicidal man just how much he has helped others.

There’s a solid relationship hook in the way Anu and Arjun end up together. She asks him if he’ll marry her because there’s another boy on the horizon, a boy found by her father. (If a bear hug became human, it would be this warm man, wonderfully played by MS Bhaskar.) Anu thinks she’d rather opt for a known devil. But dig deeper, and we see she has feelings for Arjun. She has always had feelings for him, right from their schooldays. What happens when one half of a pair of best friends harbours emotions that the other half does not (yet) have? It’s the kind of premise the rom-com was invented for.

But I found the first half insufferable. The scenes are pitched at the “en pondatti oorukku poyitta” level. The beats are loud and exaggerated, like a cartoon. I was reminded of the childish couple played by Arya and Nayanthara in Raja Rani, who were less husband and wife than Tom and Jerry. Infantile plot points are set up just so that Anu and Arjun can begin to bicker, and just so that we can quickly land up at the divorce point and with Vijay Sethupathi. He’s fine, but his portions are the worst. They feel like TV ad breaks just as a programme is getting interesting. Before any Arjun-Anu moment is allowed to fully flower, we cut back to him and his comments on that moment — rhythm-wise, the screenplay is extremely choppy.

But the second half springs the sweetest of surprises. Oh My Kadavule doesn’t just get better, it becomes brilliant. For one, God disappears, and we are freer to follow the (uninterrupted) arcs of the Anu-Arjun relationship. And two, we see that the director was deliberately going for the tonality of the first half. I mean, it’s not sloppiness. It’s a calculated creative choice. It isn’t pulled off well, but seen from the vantage of the second half, it’s easier to forgive. The film grows a big, gooey romantic heart and I began to melt — even Sha Ra, who plays Arjun and Anu’s friend, becomes tolerable.

In this half, we see an alternative scenario (somewhat like It’s A Wonderful Life) play out and the tone is no longer that of a cartoon. Ashok Selvan is no longer asked to mug madly, and as the character mellows, so does the performance. The writing sparkles. The bit where a cab driver from the first half returns is a superb touch, and it really underlines the magical-fantasy aspects of this story. I found myself smiling more and more — it was the kind of idiot-grin that appears when you’re feeling moonstruck while watching two made-for-each-other people fumble towards each other on screen.

Two actors really help. Vani Bhojan is a triumph as Meera, whom Arjun begins to have a thing for. She finds ways to freshen the cheesiest reaction shots, like the shaking the head and laughing thing, or the arching the eyebrows to gesture “What’s up!” thing. And Ritika Singh is glorious. Her instincts are superb. I’ll point to Anu’s engagement scene where she passes by rows of guests while making her entry. She smiles at everyone and then she sees Arjun and her smile dims and the second she passes him, the original wattage returns to her smile. Ritika doesn’t make a big moment out of whatever Anu is feeling inside, and the effect is as understated as a cloud floating past the sun. I wished she hadn’t been let down by the first half, but as the cinema cliché goes, I’d rather watch a movie that begins badly and then bursts into life than something that begins well and ends up making you slap your forehead and say… “Oh My Kadavule!”

I saw the trailers of this movie and Thappad on the same day and couldn’t help but wonder about the hypocrisy: We rightly celebrate the woman who is not willing to put up with a single slap, but at the same time we have no qualms about laughing in two scenes showing a woman slapping a man.

I look at the photo published in this blog and wonder how people will react if the man and the woman are interchanged in the same pose.

Watched this yesterday…. first half was painful (and yes i too think it was shot this way so the contrast is more apparent in the second half). But I enjoyed the Vijay Sethupathi scenes — for me seeing him was soothing compared to the Anu-Arjun over-the-top cuteness. Second half was really nice – because you know the contrast is coming (although not along the grim lines of 12B/Sliding door, but more along the Frank Capra classic).

The Enfield Bullet Road Trip (R)(T) is a tad overused by now — but I was reminded of Madhavan biking to Chennai in Iridhi Sutru (Ritika’s debut). The ending was a little over the top, but overall very enjoyable.

On topic though, I found it refreshing that the heroine is also allowed t to drink and she is not a slut as most Tamil films will make her to be. I particularly liked the scene where she runs from her wedding and goes to the bar. The surprise on the face of the bartender is not for the 3 tequila shots she orders but for her outfit.

I do wish the the “nagging wife” trope is also buried eventually. Too many non existent laughs from this one.

Vani Bhojan’s character sketch never really comes to fruition except when she reneges on the movie contract but ends up being immature as well with her gesture of flipping them the bird.

If it’s a coming-of-age story [it’s not] then there shud’ve been some sort of evolution or justification for the fickle-minded activites of Ashok Selvan’s character. On the one hand he sets out to be still a boy who has his teenage fantasies about Vani Bhojan’s character playing out in his mind. On the other hand, we the audience, never get to see what changes his mind about Ritika Singh’s character from his initial perception of her. She’s supposed to be complemental of Vani Bhojan’s character by filling some sort of a blank for him to see her in a new light but she remains a passive presence except when she gets jealous and that too seems mechanical like every other part of their marriage. It’s M.S.Bhaskar’s character that actually nudges him towards his daughter. By the time he comes to know of Vani Bhojan’s character’s romantic allegiance he’s already into Ritika Singh’s character again. So, neither was Vani Bhojan’s character dissuasive enuf nor was Ritika Singh’s character enticing enuf to justify Ashok Selvan’s character’s choices. Therefore it came off as though the hero is merely physically attracted to both the characters, granted it was inadvertent in case of Ritika Singh’s character. To sum up, Ashok Selvan’s character’s childhood crush doesn’t come to fruition but Ritika Singh’s character’s crush does. No growth or maturity with any of these characters and Vani Bhojan’s character is tangential at best. Sha Ra’s character is irrelevant.

“Kadhal Kuzhappudhey” song . . . yet another attempt to blend popular songs from the west. The strings have been influenced by the acoustic riffs of Bon Jovi’s Wanted Dead or Alive and Blaze of Glory, the rhythm base is George Thorogood’s Bad to the Bone and Alannah Myles’s Black Velvet is layered amidst all of these.

I wouldn’t call it a half-decent romance just because the first half wasn’t as brilliant as the second half.

Isn’t the first half a narration device and we probably should be cribbing about it. It is not like the second half is brilliant on its own. No, the second half is brilliant because of the first one, which makes both half complementary to each other.

And I wouldn’t exactly relate the first half of OMK to the one in Raja Rani. IMO, these actually looked like two people who were friends and were figuring out how the marriage would work. Arya and Nayantara for me, never looked like a couple at all so that was jarring and annoying. Here not so much.

The only scene which I thought was out of place was the lodge scene. It didn’t really add anything, just made the whole atmosphere tasteless, just for a tiny moment.

Ashok Selvan was adequate I’d say. Ritika and Vani Bhojan were too amazing. Ritika’s role has two entirely different shades. And she pulls it off perfectly.

There were several awwwwww moments. For some weird reason, the dynamics of the lead pair in the second half reminded me of Gantumoote.

I also love that the young crop of directors really know a thing or two about cinematography. The color pallette was warm and fuzzy that we have now come to associate with Malayalam films. Otherwise we would get Raja Rani kind of bland fully lit frames.

For me, cheating doesn’t justify slapping. In a relationship, it is upto the COUPLE to agree on which of the above two is tolerable to THEM. In case of violation or in the absence of such an agreement, one can always respond to it by terminating the relationship.

Regarding her hypocrisy about the girl slapping 4 men incident, I am not able to see that part of the video where Neha is seen PRAISING the woman for slapping men.

I feel she reacted strongly to the man since his comment had perhaps triggered a personal memory. Just because she didn’t react in the same way to the woman doesn’t mean that she is approving the woman’s behavior. As they say, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

I found myself smiling more and more — it was the kind of idiot-grin that appears when you’re feeling moonstruck while watching two made-for-each-other people fumble towards each other on screen.

Couldn’t agree more BR . The second half of the movie hit all of my sweetspots that yearned for a cheesy mushy rom-com. But no, the lead-pair’s initial marriage scenes are worlds removed from Raja Rani’s. Ritika and Ashok really looked like a young couple trying to live like roomates while figuring out about marriage and not like Arya and Nayantara who were annoyingly angry at each other without any reason whatsoever. Also, I thought instead of jumping to the bedroom scene where they are trying to awkwardly make love, the movie could have shown us some scenes where they clumsily make their way to bed. It would have lent a bit of weight to the proceedings which the first half desperately needed. I didn’t mind VJS and Thilak too,in fact I thought VJS was showing Ashok on how to do even the OTT scenes with a bit of ease. Agree about Sha Ra though. It felt like he was there just to flash the director’s feelings about the sanctity of love and marriages.

But points for the director for not showing urban women as some sort of an alien species who can neither mouth the language nor do a simple task by themselves.

P.S – Am I the only one who was wishing that they had waited until M.S. Bhaskar had naturally grown some beard before actually filming his scenes ? His fake beard looked all kinds of atrocious on him that it is a testament to the man’s acting prowess that we feel even a semblance of emotion towards his character in-spite of it.

They cudn’t get something even as simple as Vani Bhojan’s character’s “casual” hugs right, they all are uncomfortably forced and they stick out.

@Naren – Right !? I thought she was great in all of her scenes except for when she was asked to hug someone. You can clearly see that she feels very ill-at-ease at hugging people. Ritika was good too but I felt a strange sense of deja-vu seeing her in the court scenes and filing for a divorce in a movie with VJS !